https://aliahd66.substack.com/p/pulwama-india-pussy-foots-around?sd=pf
Not too many should care for Satya Pal Malik. He set the stage for the Center to decapitate Article 370 by hastily dissolving the legislative assembly, despite knowing – by his own admission in the Karan Thapar interview - of the forming of a coalition that could last the remainder of the session.
His belated ‘revelations’ too have nothing new and of note. Malik’s is old wine in new bottle, though some still want a drink from it.
That no one has been punished for the delinquency surrounding the Pulwama episode is well known. Malik’s view that the Center looked the other way so as to profit domestically from the attack is also widely held.
Missing in the fresh look at Pulwama today is the picture that forms from the threads Malik leaves hanging.
Shooting the messenger
He says that the explosive laden car was moving around for some 10 days and more. He informs that some eight odd key road intersections in the general area were left unattended by the road opening parties. To him, the explosives were Pakistani handiwork, though the cracks through which crept in the terror attack were provided by Indian inattention.
He thus craftily lays off from putting together the implications of what he is saying. The attendant commentary too has avoided taking the bull by the horns. It too has fallen by the official line of a Pakistani provenance of the attack, which the regime allowed to hit the target for its own reasons.
Malik has his reasons to have gone public with his version. Down to one security guard – security having been pulled back by the typically vindictive regime for his outspokenness on the farmers agitation - he is obviously uncomfortable.
However, noteworthy is not his criticism of the regime as much as what he obscures in the process. By attributing the explosives to Pakistan, he propagates the regime’s narrative. By taking back his earlier take on Amit Shah’s comment on Narendra Modi, he ingratiates himself back into the good books of the regime’s chief hatchet man.
This supposedly revelatory interview – that Thapar has oversold and the opposition has gone to town with – is the use of Malik by the regime for its own purposes and Malik’s self-interested lending of his supposedly credible image. Count the number of times Malik touches his nose and see if he is suffering the Pinocchio syndrome.
The Pulwama strike is being used to show up the regime either as negligent or as culpable in letting it get through for using the counter strike in its aftermath for vote catching purposes. Malik’s interview shows the latter as the more likely of the two.
This is bad enough, though a worse possibility has been elided in the discussion so far.
In the rear-view mirror
There were intelligence soundings on an impending strike but the regime deliberately played along – mounting an ambush for Pakistan to walk into. It could then use the aftermath to nail Pakistan, both diplomatically - as fount of terror - and militarily with a surgical strike – with an aerial strike at Balakot.
For a regime swearing by Chanakya to take advantage of the Pulwama-Balakot episode is unremarkable. It had ridden on the apron strings of the military’s earlier surgical strikes in elections in Uttar Pradesh and had conducted Parakram Parv in the subsequent year to influence voters in provincial polls about then.
Malik has only served enhance the regime’s assiduously built-up image for craftiness. This helps the strong-on-defence credentials in which its Kautilyan deceit and cunning keeps India secure from neighbourly treachery.
It’s to the regime’s credit that it went ahead with Operation Bandar - its strike at Balakot – risking a Pakistani Operation Swift Resort. Whereas Amit Shah beat the drums of success after Balakot, the Air Force has been more circumspect.
To Amit Shah, 300 dead madrasa children may mean nothing, but such a scenario would have been a hit-wicket for India. Luckily, its Air Force missed target. It would certainly have been untenable in international law if it had scored bulls-eye.
The strike wasn’t quite ‘preemptive’, as the senior Indian diplomat put it in the press conference that afternoon, but at best was ‘preventive’, an international law innovation that even the United States (US) could not pull off.
Whereas Israel can weather diplomatic storms that result from such action, India is not quite in its league with a skin thickened by a superpower’s patronage.
Whereas India might have missed target due to the complexity of the operation, it is not impossible that the target might have been deliberately missed – in a kind of step-up in the messaging to Pakistan.
That Pakistan - in turn - claims to have deliberately missed the targets along the Line of Control (LC) strengthens the case that the aerial exchanges were more messaging than the real thing.
That hot pursuit resulted in a downed Indian plane is merely uncertainty surrounding combat.
A military historian famously has it that not only were the air strikes a success, but the Pakistani counter was dented by their loss of an F-16 – the latter claim under-grid by grant of a gallantry award to the Mig-21 pilot who - however improbably - downed the F-16.
Sensibly, the regime quickly climbed down from its rhetorical high when references to readiness of missiles started being bandied by both sides. It allowed the US to intervene tacitly with its good offices, using the return of the captured pilot to wind down the crisis.
The crisis had served its purpose. The day after Balakot witnessed a Modi jaunt in the Delhi Metro. This was perhaps advised by his choreographers in the Prime Minister’s Office after seeing the Oscar winning Churchill that shows Churchill milling with the London Underground crowds after having ordered D-Day.
The difference wouldn’t ever be known to the domestic audience – the Churchill had escaped his security to have a breath of fresh air away from officialdom, whereas Modi was just being Modi. Pakistan’s swift retort came the following morning.
Modi’s not cornered yet
For the opposition to now take up cudgels on this Pulwama episode is easy to understand. There is little ammunition it has and in election year it must make good use of any purchase it gets to keep Modi from repeating his hattrick of election wins from Gujarat at the national stage.
An alert opposition also puts Modi on notice that similar gambits this time round would not win him any political dividend.
What the kerfuffle certainly cannot do by itself is to keep Modi from another electoral victory.
The regime is on comfortable ground. It has taken care not to publicly pursue where the explosives came from, so that its contention that it was orchestrated by Pakistan is not watered down.
Even if it did not come on the back of infiltrators – infiltration had fallen precipitately by then and the Army would furiously contest that it came through the LC – it could have been collected from the several dozen road and dam building sites across Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) by a nexus of over-ground workers. The regime may have since quietly plugged the explosive pipeline.
The Pakistan card helps the regime tip-toe away from the wreckage that had 40 bodies of troopers in it. If the regime did not concede a joint parliamentary committee on Adani, it is hardly likely to come up with a white paper on Pulwama.
Next-of-kin agitation is not going to budge it either, Rs 1 crore each compensation having been dispensed already per victim to keep them from asking after or the truth. The Rajasthan government just turned down a demand for jobs for relatives.
There’s is no dearth of explosive availability within Kashmir. The explosives used in the Malegaon terror attack were procured by an army intelligence official. It may well have been from stocks confiscated from anti-national elements there, in official custody.
However, if, as Malik implies, the regime was in the know of a tragedy waiting to happen, it cannot be put beyond Indian intelligence capability and venality that India either turned a blind eye as the explosives were put together at a Pakistani handler’s behest, or - going a step further - facilitated access to explosives.
The conspiracy theory kicks in
There are two kinds of black operations.
One is facilitation, allowing a terror attack to get through or nudging it a certain way. The second is orchestrating a terror attack oneself.
In the Pulwama case either of the two is plausible.
A clue is in the posting of controversial police officer, Devendra Singh, till the preceding year in Pulwama. Expectedly, Malik lets him off the hook, saying he was not ‘anti-national’.
To be sure Singh was not being anti-national in putting together the elements that go into a black operation – arguably he was doing his duty in line with his expertise.
Later reports on the Pulwama bomber have it that he had been in and out of the police station some six times, some of which may have been when Singh was part of the Pulwama police team.
Recall also, Singh figures in the conspiracy angle to the parliament attack, allegedly one of the intelligence agents who facilitated the move of terrorists to Delhi for the job. If true, this makes that incident a black operation of the first kind.
Most recently, he was let off the hook for ferrying terrorists in his car – terrorists who were involved in another possible Indian black operation of the second kind designed to implicate Kashmiri militants – and at one remove Pakistan. In this operation, non-Kashmiri migrant workers were gunned down in wake of the Article 370 clampdown.
Singh roaming free can only be for services of an appropriate order rendered earlier – no less than playing a stellar role in facilitating black operations.
Importantly, if there is a Singh at the tactical level, there has to also be an expert hand at the strategic level. More intimate tracing of the career trajectories of intelligence insiders - than has recently been done in a book by a master of the ‘trade’ - might have a future tale on this score.
The then corps commander – who incidentally was just then settling into his new job - announced that the Pulwama bomber’s team had been neutralized within a couple of days of the atrocity. Evidently, this could have been done preemptively too. (Malik’s intervention may delay release of the biography of the General, now retired.)
Going toe-to-toe with the mainstream narrative
It’s a pity that conspiracy theories - as here - don’t have traction.
Firstly, mainstream analysts and media risk missing out on crumbs from the table if they entertain such speculation. Secondly, just as earlier, so to in the post-truth age, the dominant narrative and - indeed history itself - is written by the one with an upper hand, which in India’s case currently are Hindutva minders. Thirdly, it’s become dangerous to say the obvious in authoritarian India. Investigative journalists are extinct and those who dare, hounded.
However, factoring in the conspiracy theory makes things fall into place.
India is no stranger to black operations.
When it was blindsided by the Kargil caper of the Pakistan Army, India was severely pushed on to the backfoot in the Valley. It needed to get back at Pakistan. Operation Kabaddi, involving seizing a few Pakistani posts on the LC, to up the ante, was thought up.
Mindful that India was no Israel, India was restrained by the lack of a persuasive casus belli. Along came a timely terror attack on the legislative assembly in Srinagar. In the event, 9/11 intervened and Operation Kabaddi had to be stowed away.
Musharraf, fearful of being bombed back into the stone age, cuddled up with the US. However, duplicity compelled him to try to open up a second front to his east in an India angered by the back-to-back terror attacks on the assembly and parliament. It would have allowed him a reasonable excuse to quit corralling the Taliban and Al Qaeda on his northern border.
Alternatively, if these terror instances were of the second kind - India initiated - then it can plausibly be argued that India was manufacturing a casus belli to rein in Pakistan. Agra talks having failed there was the military instrument left.
The conspiracy theory has it that the parliament attack was allowed to go through – if not orchestrated by itself – by India to give it an excuse for coercive diplomacy. The US could help pull some of India’s chestnuts out of the fire.
The trials of SAR Geelani and of Afzal Guru have enough loose ends to infer that there was more to the parliament attack than the mainstream narrative has it.
The first kind of black operation is seen yet again at least twice later on.
26/11 has such finger prints all over it. As with the Pulwama attack, it had Pakistani provenance. Elided however is that it might well have had an Indian adjunct, in which a set of majoritarian extremists infiltrated a Pakistani terror attack to kill the redoubtable police officers who were on their scent: Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte.
Similarly, there is little doubt that the Pathankot terror attack had Pakistani origin. That a senior officer of the police helped out the attackers by lending them his official car makes this a black operation of the first category. Unlike the crew of the Kuber – who were summarily disposed-off by the Mumbai attackers - this police officer merely had his hands tied-up.
The second kind of black operation is also well represented in Indian repertoire. Exoneration of Muslims accused in the Mumbai train bombings shows it up as a plausible black operation.
It’s self-evident that Muslims supposedly out to avenge the Gujarat pogrom were also victims of black operations: ‘Encounters’. The victims included a girl of nineteen and a housewife, raped, murdered and then burnt.
The latest black operation of the second kind has been televised live: the killing of Atiq Ahmed. This time round black operations have come out of the closet: holes in the story deliberately left for all to see - and fear. It’s ‘terrorism’ – the action being the message and the message broadcast.
Whats to be done?
Even if the line of argument here is entirely misplaced, a few things need being done in any case.
First, the Intelligence Bureau needs to be domesticated through appropriate legislation. Second, the National Investigative Agency has to be rescued from being yet another caged parrot. Third, the parliament must give itself a standing committee to oversee the intelligence domain. Fourth, the Courts must wise up to reality.
Getting the structure right isn’t enough. There is culture to contend with too.
One, Rule of Law is an attitude, an approach. Never our strength, it’s been drawn and quartered over the last nine years under Amit Shah’s stewardship, the architect of the Gujarat Model in this sphere.
Two, the assumption that anything written in Sanskrit is panacea needs review. Chanakya may have had it right once. Adapting him to India’s current circumstance with better interpretative studies needs being done. Indian Knowledge Systems have to be decontaminated of supremacism.
Three, stop hagiography in the name of analysis. Call out brown-nosed analysts and red-clawed strategy minders. The imposition against security services’ members writing their memoirs is testimony of hidden skeletons. When military history is served hot from the Establishment’s cauldron, why must dissenting conspiracy theorists – as this writer - run a reputational risk?
Lessons from Malik’s belated outburst
The price of not doing right is high.
Politically, it is evident that Hindutva has taken over the intelligence domain. In fact, there might even be a nefarious nexus between the two that propelled Hindutva to political power. The Deep State must be dismantled as part of detoxification if the improbable does happen in 2029.
Strategically, believing as Nationalists do in, ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is wrong. Patriotism requires strategists to push for the State to be right. Strategic ethics demands that when patriotism is enough, nationalism is unnecessary.
Diplomatically, what-ever the ever-glib Dr. S Jaishankar and his able diplomats might say in the chambers of the international community on terrorism, their counterparts must surely be reading cables home from their Delhi embassies.
Militarily, the only institution that can possibly speak truth to power and get away with it is the military. It must query orders such as received by Gen ‘Paddy’ Padmanabhan: ‘Dekhenge’. It surely received a similar order after Galwan.
The military must point out that if the black operations are deducted from Pakistan’s corpus on villainy, then it is amenable to meaningful outreach. Else, the Two Front threat will never go away. To buy into the Hindutva-propagated millennial adversary, the Muslim, both inhouse and next-door, is to be political.
Malik may yet have done some good by speaking up, even if traversing known terrain. For this service to strategic discussion, he should be given back his exalted threat status and security detail.
